But 2 months ago 580's were worth the extra $100-$150 over a 6970 for the same FPS increase, right? RIGHT?

Flip flop some moar...

The 580s offer things the 6970s don't:

1. PhysX
2. Real 3d
3. Forced ambient occlusion
4. SSAA
5. Multi GPU drivers that work the day a game launches
6. Features like AA or texture decompression in some games that aren't there for ATi
7. CUDA apps

So yeah, with more performance on tap, and a non poor dick broke feature set, I did recommend 580s over 6970s. (and similarly don't think 7970s performance margin makes them a better buy as they have the same feature set with some pretty meaningless additions like "adjustable tesselation".

[SIZE="1"]NVIDIA Focus Group Member
[B]NVIDIA Focus Group Members receive free software and/or hardware from NVIDIA from time to time to facilitate the evaluation of NVIDIA products. However, the opinions expressed are solely those of the Members.[/B][/SIZE]

1. PhysX
2. Real 3d
3. Forced ambient occlusion
4. SSAA
5. Multi GPU drivers that work the day a game launches
6. Features like AA or texture decompression in some games that aren't there for ATi
7. CUDA apps

So yeah, with more performance on tap, and a non poor dick broke feature set, I did recommend 580s over 6970s. (and similarly don't think 7970s performance margin makes them a better buy as they have the same feature set with some pretty meaningless additions like "adjustable tesselation".

1. Yeah how about them 2 physx games last year? LOL. Its dead.
2. Actually, IIRC, AMD actually has support for 3d in more games than NV does via third party software.
3. Yawn. Worst feature ever, kills performace and adds an effect most people can't even see.
4. AMD has SSAA too.
5. SLI has the same number of problems as crossfire, NV only claims better in TWIMTBP game where they've bought off early access to game code, kudos for that, I guess.
6. Name some?
7. OpenCL apps.

1. PhysX2. Real 3d
3. Forced ambient occlusion
4. SSAA
5. Multi GPU drivers that work the day a game launches
6. Features like AA or texture decompression in some games that aren't there for ATi
7. CUDA apps

So yeah, with more performance on tap, and a non poor dick broke feature set, I did recommend 580s over 6970s. (and similarly don't think 7970s performance margin makes them a better buy as they have the same feature set with some pretty meaningless additions like "adjustable tesselation".

The first picture of a non-reference design AMD Radeon HD 7970, which comes from Gigabyte. The GV-R797OC-3GD is a factory-overclocked card, which makes use of Gigabyte's Ultra Durable VGA+ PCB and custom-design triple-fan WindForce cooler.

Quote:

The Ultra Durable VGA+ PCB uses a 2oz copper layer for better electrical stability and heat distribution, ferrite-core chokes, low RDS (on) MOSFETs, hand-picked high-performance GDDR5 memory chips, and more. The cooler sports a combination of heatsinks and aluminum fin arrays to feed heat from the GPU, memory, and VRM to its copper heat-pipes and ventilated by three fans.

Powercolor 7970 (Expect a huge o/c on this one)

Quote:

PowerColor is a major AMD partner and we already saw their Vortex cooler in action back on the HD 6970. As far as the PCB is concerned we don't have much details other than it has a beefier VRM and that the card will draw power from two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors so we guess that it could end up with a nice factory overclock and more overclocking room when compared to the reference card.